WE’RE #2!….Nick Denton says that French isn’t even in the top ten of world languages, and it’s about time the French learned it. Whatever. What I’m really interested in his contention (based on figures from the Summer Institute for Linguistics) that English is the #3 language worldwide with 322 million speakers.
Just counting the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, Canada (minus Quebec), and Australia, I get a population of about 400 million, which puts English at #2. Even discounting the 20 million or so non-English speakers in the U.S., we’ve still got at least 380 million native English speakers worldwide.
So what’s up? Do they not count children or something?
